HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies

Volume 25 Number 1 Himalaya No. 1 & 2 Article 7

2005

Sex in the Snow: The Himalayas as Erotic Topos in Popular Hindi Cinema

Philip Lutgendorf University of Iowa

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Recommended Citation Lutgendorf, Philip. 2005. Sex in the Snow: The Himalayas as Erotic Topos in Popular Hindi Cinema. HIMALAYA 25(1). Available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol25/iss1/7

This Research Article is brought to you for free and open access by the DigitalCommons@Macalester College at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PHILIP LUTGENDORF, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

SEx IN THE SNow: THE HIMALAYAS AS EROTIC Toros IN PoPULAR HINDI CINEMA,

Fantasies about life beyond the front range of the Great Himalaya have been a trope in ln­ dian literature since at least the period of the Sanskrit epics. The demi-divine beings believed to inhabit the high country were famously sexually active, and even the human "northern Kurus" (as residents of the region have somet.imes been called) were rumored to have long, happy lives unburdened by inhibitions, especially in sexual matters: their women were alleg­ edly free to enjoy multiple extra-marital liasons and polyandrous marriages. Such legends appear to persist in popular 20th century narrative through a much-used trope in Bombay Epic and puranic cinema: the depiction of the Himalayas as a realm of uninhibited romantic fantasy. Although literature routinely this trope is often confined to virtually extra-narrative song sequences that whisk the hero and heroine to Himalayan (or lately European or even New Zealand alpine) locales, a number depicts cloud­ of highly successful films have given it much more extended treatment by romantically pair­ piercing summits ing a plains-dwelling hero with a Himalayan heroine. This article briefly traces th e history and high altitude of this scenario and then considers the contextual and cultural implications of its use in two · lakes .. .frequented notable films: Raj Kapoor's Ran1 Tcri Ganga lvlaili (1984) and Mani Ratnam's Oil Sc (1998). by scantily-clad supernaturals ... who amorously : frolic there, INTRODUCTION in the cinematic narratives that India so abundantly produces and consumes. I refer here to the association evidently immune Long before they came to be identified by modern of high mountains with romance and eroticism. For to the arctic-like geographers as the loftiest mountains on earth, the one of the standard scenic locales of song and dance high Himalayas had generated a powerful response in cold. sequences in mainstream Bombay films-along with the imaginations of people living on the lowlands to such settings as the kotha for a ghazal, the cabaret or their south. The ancient Indian understanding of the disco for a jazz or rock number, and the temple for a '' north as particularly auspicious among the cardinal bhajan-is the mountainside as venue for a lovesong. directions apparently derives from its association with Not uncommonly, a film's romantic principals the shining white summits that formed the northern are transported to a landscape of flower-covered boundary of Aryavarta and were understood to be meadows, rushing streams, and snow-capped the abode of its gods, and when Krishna, in the tenth summits, amidst which they frolic, display frequent chapter of the Blwgavad-gita, metaphorically likened changes of apparel, and coyly sing of their budding himself, as supreme being, to the highest degree of all love for one another. Not uncommonly the sequence earthly things, it was only natural for him to invoke climaxes with the pair on an icy slope, playfully the proverbial "stability" and "endurance" of the 'tossing snowballs at one another, or rolling downhill Himalaya ("sthavaranam Himalayah"; Bhagavad-gita in each other's arms. The transport of the lovers to 10:25). However, my concern in the present essay this locale may be accounted for diegetically-e.g., is with a less exalted and, so to say, more "secular" through the pretext of a mountain excursion on which understanding of these mountains that likewise has they briefly embark-but at times it is not; in the ancient roots, but that enjoys a particularly visible latter case, the first strains of what will obviously be a persistence in modern popular culture, especially love song are simply accompanied by an abrupt shift

• from an urban or soundstage set to an alpine landscape-a the time during their twelve years of vanavasa or forest visual shift that is accepted by audiences, although it is also exile, they enter a landscape of pine fore sts, ice fi elds, and sometimes the butt of jokes. Indeed, the repetition of this soaring, jagged summits, some with names that (nowadays) convention in numerous films is periodically cited by critics correspond to well known peaks: Kaila sh, Hemalwta, Baelrinath who complain of the supposedly "formulaic" and "mindless" (Mahablwratd 3:109-170). Yet apparently "realistic" evocations quality of song sequences in mainstream cinema. of subalpine and alpine vegetation and rock formations are Yet a more culturally distanced observer may question regularly interspersed with highly fanciful descriptions: lush how this topos became a subtropical groves (such as "formula" in the first place. the lwdali-vana or "plantain For 1 would venture that, forest" in which Bhima in American and European encounters his immortal cinemas, although the sight half-brother Hanuman), of high mountains may ponds covered with lotuses carry certain routine as­ of celestial fragrance, and sociations for audiences animals (such as peacocks, (e.g., of awe-inspiring elephants, and lions) that are natural splendor, rugged not native to high altitudes. adventure, or the chal­ The epic mountains partake lenge of wilderness and its in a (literally) heightened dangers), it does not auto­ way of the surreal qualities matically evoke shringara that distinguish the literary rasa-the aesthetic mood trope of the "forest" or of eros. Why it apparently wilderness (vana, aranya, does in Hindi cinema bears Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore as the lovers in Shakti Samanta's Aradhana jangala) from that of examining. In this essay I ("Adoration"), 1969. the settled or cultivated will first consider some ap­ lands of city and village parent precursors of this trope in classical and pre-modern (nagara, grama), which are typically more realistically (albeit narratives-a consideration that will entail challenging the idealistically) described; they constitute an extra-social realm modern Western ideological divide between the imaginative of mystery, danger, and supernatural power, and are the realms of the "sacred" and the "secular." I will then turn haunt of divine and demi-divine beings who are "immortal" to one extended variant on the trope that has received re­ (or anyhow exceptionally long-lived) and potentially both peated treatment in Hindi film s: a plot in which a boy from beneficent and dangerous to human beings who stumble into the plains falls in love with a girl from the mountains, to their realm (Lutgendorf 2000:270-73, 280). examine its artful use by two notable directors. Here my ar­ But what does all this have to do with eros? Here we may gument will be that, as is the case with other stock conven­ recall that most of the supernatural beings in Hindu mythol­ tions of mainstream cinema, the familiarity and associations ogy are (as we say nowadays) "sexually active," and that erot­ of the "Himalayan love song" topos make possible not only ic sports are indeed one of the principal ways in which they its routine deployment for evoking a predictable and desired while away the eons. The immortals "play" eternally, often aesthetic mood, but also its more creative and provocative amorously, and preferably in remote locations of breathtak­ use in films that open up the possibility of questioning or ing natural beauty; the northern mountains, which bridge critiquing prevailing discourses 2 the gap between earthly and heavenly lolws, appear to be among their favorite worldly playgrounds. Epic and puranic literature routinely depicts cloud-piercing summits and high PLAYGROUND OF THE IMMORTALS altitude lakes as sites frequented by scantily-clad supernatu­ Although the Himalayas are periodically invoked in vedic rals such as voluptuous apsaras and strappinggandlwrvas and texts as the abode of the gods (eleva loha, eleva bhumi), vidyadharas - lndic mythology's party animals par excel­ it is only in the Sanskrit epics, and especially in the lence - who amorously frolic there, evidently immune to Mahablwrata-a number of whose principal cha~·acters the arctic-like cold. As for yahslws, their yellow-eyed king make long journeys into the high country-that we fir's t find Kubera holds sway over the famous Himalayan dream city of extended descriptions of their scenery. These are suggestive Alaka, a place where every desire is indulged. both of some firsthand observation and of a great deal of Where yal1slws dwell with lovely women in white mansions , imaginative projection and poetic license. When the heroic Whose crystal terraces reOect the stars like Oowers.They drink Pandava brothers and their common wife Draupadi, guided the wine of love distilled from magic trees. .. (Meghaduta 66) by the venerable sage Lomasha, venture into the Himalayas Kalidasa based his famous poem Meghaduta on the pretext during a sub-continental pilgrimage undertaken to pass of a lonely yahslw who has been exiled from this paradise and is languishing in (modern day) Madhya Pradesh, dream- ners (e.g., Berreman 1972:354-55). These practices too seem ing of his distant beloved, whose own viraha is inflamed by to have a mythological prototype in the numerous puranic the constant dalliance going on around her3 ln later tantric, tales of the "daughter of the mountain," Parvati, a headstrong nath yogic, and alchemical literature, the long-eyed apsaras girlcgoddess who independently decides to make Shiva her sporting on mountain heights were often joined (literally) by husband in defiance of her family and of the seven divine human paramours, or rather by divinized humans who by sages, and who practices arduous asceticism in order to their own efforts had transmuted their mortal coils into the win his love (e.g., Dimmitt and van Buitenen 1978:157-65). deathless (and erotically irresistible) "ada- 1f such willful mountain maidens truly mantine bodies" (vcijra deha) of siddlws- existed in ancient times, they may have "those who have accomplished [their aim] ." acquired particular notoriety during the (White 1996:238, 323) period usually identified as the "classical Apart from the legendary libido of the ce- age" (roughly the first millennium of the lestials and earthly immortals, which might Common Era), whose surviving dharma inevitably color any account of a geographi- shastra compendia suggest an increasingly cal area styled cleva-bhumi, several other patriarchal and misogynistic ideology explanations may be advanced for these per- among plains-dwelling brahman legalists. vasive ancient fantasies. The first is simply Once again, the Mahabharata seems to that the Himalayas were both famous and offer a lows c!assiws for the literary de- remote; everyone knew about them but very piction of both the alluring and threat- few people really knew or had visited them. ening deviance of mountain peoples in Hence they were both (so to speak) "on the its periodic allusions to a folk known as map" and simultaneously out-of-this-world, the "Northern Kurus" (uttaralwru). As the and thus a realm-like the Amazon jungle, name suggests, these are human beings the "wild west," and "darkest Africa" for 19th who share descent from the same ances- century Euro-Americans, and "outer space" tor as the heroes of the epic, the Kurus for their 20th century descendants- that A contemporar)' poster depicting Shiva who dwell in the Kurukshetra region of and Parvati in the Himala)'aS (artist invited imaginative projection, especially unknown). the Indo-Gangetic plain, but who reside of urges that were (in theory) to be strictly further north, indeed on the far slope of regulated among the socialized (shishta) inhabitants of kar- the Himalayas (which, in epic geography, is akin to being ma-bhwni, the everyday world of dutiful activity. on the dark side of the moon). Their realm partakes of the A second explanation (suggested to me by Bruce Sullivan) mysterious and paradise-like qualities of the Himalayas that is that the Himalayas-like their presiding deity, Shiva- have already been mentioned, and also displays features sug- partake of the paradoxical quality that historians of religion gestive of variant human social organization. Thus in Book term coincidentia oppositorum; hence they can simultaneously One, when the childless King Pandu tries to convince his be known as the realm of the most extreme renunciation and wife Kunti to have sex with another man in order to beget asceticism (tapobhwni) and of the most uninhibited indul- sons, he recounts the tale of an earlier era in which married gence-expressed, for example, in the long-extended and women were unrestricted in their sexual liaisons and "took world-destabilizing loveplay of the renunciant yogi Shiva their pleasure where it pleased them." Although this era end- and his wife Parvati on the summit of Mount Kailash (a dal- ed abruptly through the curse of an irascible brahman youth, liance that eventually produces mountains of semen and a the King notes that this "eternal dharma that favors women" six-headed son, though that is another story). Asceticism and is still followed by animals, and also that "it still prevails eroticism, in Wendy Doniger's well-known binary, are thus among the Northern Kurus." (Mahabharata 1:113; van Buite­ dual faces of the extra-social and world-transcending life of nen 1973:253). Later, in Book Two when the Pandava broth­ the mountains. ers embark on a "conquest of the four directions" (digvyaya) A third explanation, however, may be rooted in (real or ru­ in preparation for their rajasuya sacrifice, Arjuna is assigned mored) human behavior: the lifeways of mountain peoples, the task of subduing kingdoms to the north. He advances as reported to or imagined by the dwellers on the Indo-Gan­ far into the Himalayas, passing the Manas lake and even getic plains. Modern ethnographers' accounts of the practic­ extracting tribute from the demi-divine Kimpurushas and es of villagers in the Himalayan regions suggest concepts of Gandharvas, until he reaches the border of the Uttarakurus' dharma and particularly of feminine deportment that some­ realm. Here he is placated with gifts but is turned back with times deviate from those promoted among caste Hindus on a stern warning that anyone who ventures further will die, ·the plains, most notably in occasional instances of polyandry and also that, even if he entered this enchanted realm, he rather than polygamy, bride-price rather than dowry, and in would not perceive anything "for no human eye can see what a value system that sometimes offers greater freedom and is here" (Mahabharata 2:25, van Buitenen 1975:80). Appar­ agency to women, especially in their choice of marital part- ently, not even Arjuna, the idealized son of lndra who moves easily between earthly and heavenly realms, is able to crack recently of New Zealand) for mountain footage in films dur­ the door to the forbidden kingdom of the Northern Kuru ing the 1990s, however, reOected not simply the cachet of cousins, with their looser, woman-fri endly dharmic code.1 international travel but also the practical difficulty of siting Of course, the five Pandavas had themselves entered a de­ and shooting film stories in Kashmir, a state that had now viant polyandrous marriage with the princess Draupadi- a become associated less with romance than vvith terrorism narrative necessity that was apparently already problematic and insurgency. I will return, in my conclusion, to the theme for the classical epic's authors, and that was partially jus­ of this disquieting "blending of ra sas" in the political climate tified through a strange tale, set in the high Himalayas, of of late twentieth-century India. a goddess' serial betrothal However, it is to a more to five lndras (Mahabharata sustained cinematic use of 1:189). Significantly, mod­ the trope of the mountains ern ethnographers note the that I first wish to turn: to enduring popularity, in the films whose narrative cen­ Himalayan foothills, of the trally concerns the love af­ dharmically murky Mahab­ fair between (invariably) a harata story and the worship young man from a lowland of its characters-versus I I l.' metropolis and a young the more ethically and pa­ woman from a mountain triarchally straightforward village. This too is a hardy narrative and characters of perennial of Bombay screen­ the Ramayana that find favor plays that has regularly on the Gangetic plain (Sax generated hit films , rang­ 2002:42-47). ing from Raj Kapoor's 1949 Barsaat ("Monsoon," famous for its image of Nargis, as a MOUNTAIN GIRLS Kashmiri maiden, swoon­ ARE EASY ing in the arms of the vio­ The two hoary narrative Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia in Raj Kapoor's Bobby (1973). lin-playing poet-hero Pran, patterns noted above­ which became the logo of depicting the mountains as erotic playgrounds for super­ Kapoor's R.K. Studios), to Shakti Samanta's 1964 Kashmir human beings, and as the abode of human communities Ki Kali ("bud of Kashmir," starring Shammi Kapoor as the who practice a deviant social code that affords more sexual runaway son of an industrialist and Sharmi.la Tagore as a agency to women-both seem echoed in the tropes of post­ Oower-seller in the Vale) , to Dev Anand's 1971 Hare Rama, Independence Hindi cinema. The former is represented, I Hare Krishna (which transports the· scenario to a Kathmandu suggest, in the commonplace "mountain love song" that has Valley under siege by Western hippies, whose anarchic and the purpose of removing the film's hero and heroine (whose drug-induced culture of "free love" serves as titillating back­ love often defies patriarchal family strictures or social drop to the hero's romance with a self-assertive mountain taboos) to an extra-societal realm long associated with erotic girl, played by Mumtaz),5 to Subhash Ghai's 1999 Taal dalliance. Such scenes occur in a large number of highly ("beat"), in which a rich Bombay boy named Manav ("man­ successful films, such as Shakti Samanta's Araclhana (1969), kind") meets a mountain-dwelling dancer named Manasi a film that daringly broached the theme of premarital sex, or ("mind-born," an epithet of several sacred Himalayan rivers Raj Kapoor's Bobby (1973), a story of inter-communal teenage and lakes) 6 As the heavily-loaded names of the hero and romance. heroine in the last-named film suggest, these scenarios read­ The fact that such interludes are sometimes worked into ily invoke a complex array of thematic polarities that have the plot on the thinnest pretext or are even inserted non­ often been explored in popular narrative: e.g., the equation diegetically as a fantasy or "dream sequence" suggests their of woman with nature, purity, and tradition and of man with assumed effectiveness at evoking a mood of sringara rasa modern civilization and its attendant ills; the contrast be­ through their reworking of a hoary cultural cliche. For de­ tween the rustic (both valorized as pure, natural, and "In­ cades, the locale-of-choice for such sequences was the Vale dian," and critiqued as coarse, "junglee," and backward) and of Kashmir and its environs, though other "hill stations" the urban (again, both in its positive valuation as modern, such as Simla and Mussoorie were also regularly used. Raj educated, and progressive, and in its negative depiction as Kapoor in his 1964 film Sangam transported his lovers to westernized, callous, and corrupted), and the tension be­ the Swiss Alps, a diegetically-justified move that permitted tween the local (embodied in ethnic costume and cultural Indian audiences to vicariously admire an "exotic" European practice) and the cosmopolitan or national (expressed in the mountain resort. The repeated use of Switzerland (and more centrism of nationalist ideology and through a supposedly pan-Indian-although in fact mainly north Indian-urban lifestyle). In addition, such narratives often invoke the sup­ posed "innocent" sensuality and sexual forwardness of the mountain maiden both as a pretext for erotic spectacle and as a plot-driving motif; e.g., with a Pahari girl boldly choos­ ing the outsider, pardesi boy in defiance of her family and community. Some of the most interesting recent writings on Hindi cinema have pointed out that successful films may use such polarities and stereotypes to negotiate the cultural ter­ rain of post-Independence India, through weaving complex, Rajiv Kapoor and Mandakini in Ram Teri Gauga lvlaili (Raj Kapoor, multi-stranded narrative sagas that permit both "dominant" 1985) and "resistant" thematic strands to be savored by viewers (e.g., Thomas 1989). I would like to apply this approach to the trope of the "Himalayan love affair" through a brief con­ Mandakini, whose stage name evokes another sacred riv­ sideration of two notable films about the relationship of a er)-who shoulders this heavy symbolic burden as jauntily lowland boy and a mountain girl. as she does the jug of Ganga-jal (Ganges water) she carries Ram Teri Ganga Maili ("God/Ram, your Ganges is soiled"), in a scene early in the film. Like her epic prototypes, this released in 1985, was Raj Kapoor's last effort as a director, divine forest-girl meets and falls for a city-boy and contracts and its massive success (it was one of the two top-grossing an informal marriage with him-and then (so to speak) it is films of the year and won several Filmfare awards-Bom­ all downhill from there. bay's equivalent of the Oscars) reconfirmed his cherished After a brief prologue depicting a rally on the banks of title of "the Great Showman." It is in fact in the grand Kapoor the Hooghly to protest the pollution of the river, a credit tradition: an ingenious, epic-scale allegory that synthesizes sequence alternates scenes of the pristine Ganga of the Hi­ classical and mythic narrative, soft-core political and social malayas with her debased form on the plains, graphically commentary (here condemning the corruption of politicians showing (in newsreel-like footage) her pollution with human allied with industrialists and championing the nascent envi­ corpses and raw sewage, while the bhcljan-style title song in­ ronmental initiatives of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi), and tones a verse (among others) that alludes to Kapoor's own audacious display of the female anatomy. Broadly speaking, previous oeuvre: his ]is Desh Men Ganga Behti Hai ("the land the narrative recapitulates the Shakuntala story, which first in which Ganga flows," 1960): appeared in the Mahabharata and then was reworked, some He who has worshiped Ganga with head humbly bowed, six centuries later, by Kalidasa into the most famous of all And who has sung the praise of the land in which she !1ows, Sanskrit dramas. Since the heroine of this story became rec­ He too now must come forward to say, 'God, your Ganga is ognized as the mother of the dynast Bharata, whose name is tainted.' reflected in the official, post-Independence name for "India" In the first half of the film, Naren (Rajiv Kapoor), the ide­ (Bharat, or "the [land of the] descendants of Bharata"), this alistic son of a Calcutta industrialist. embarks on a college tale is as portentous as it is popular. fieldtrip to Gangotri, intent on discovering whether the river But the film additionally alludes to another Mahabharata is truly pristine upstream, far from the corruption of his city. motif: that of a human prince's union with a river goddess Though his father (who is plotting Naren's marriage to the (as in King Shantanu's marriage to Ganga incarnate), as well daughter of a ruthless politician who is his crony) first re­ as to the myth of the divine river's "descent" to the human fuses him permission to go, Naren obtains it through the realm, now superimposed onto mundane space to follow her intervention of his pious, wheelchair bound grandmother meandering course over the north Indian plains to the Bay (Sushma Seth), who gives him a metal urn and begs him to of Bengal. This permits the film to offer both a spectacular "bring Ganga back" to her. Once in the Himalayas, Naren's domestic travelogue and an auspicious visual pilgrimage to group finds the road to Gangotri blocked by landslides and some of north India's most revered Hindu sites-from the settles into a holiday camp serviced by local mountain follc source of the Ganga at the Gaumukh glacier, near the Tibetan It is while ecstatically roaming the hills nearby that Naren border, to her great pilgrimage center at Banaras/Varanasi, to has his first encounter with Ganga-the-girl, in a scene bril­ her merger with the Indian Ocean at Ganga Sagar, an island liantly staged to evoke its mythic resonances: she is first off the Bengal coast. As if this were not enough, motifs and experienced through her tinkling laughter, and then rises, themes from the Ramayana and from the life story of Krishna yahshi-like, from a field of wildflowers to announce "l am and his medieval poet-devotee, the Rajput princess Mira, are Ganga." It is, of course, love-at-first-dm·shan for both young also worked in. Ethnic ontogeny, national geography, Hindu people, and their bond is cemented when Naren saves Ganga mythology, and the feminization and divinization of land from an attempted rape by a college rowdy, and then ac­ and nature thus all converge in the film's blue-eyed Hima­ companies her on a walking pilgrimage to the river's source. layan heroine, Ganga (played by Kapoor's ingenue discovery Ganga's first song, Tujhe bulaye yeh meri bah en ("my arms call to you") establishes her as both innocent and seductive, as it Himalayas; she sings of her viraiJa as autumn leaves flutter follows her during an ostensible morning bath excursion to a down, and gives birth to a son as snow falls on the hills. Yet waterfall during which she repeatedly calls out "a a ja re" ("0, when Naren still fails to appear by the following spring (and come to me!"). The voyeuristic side of Kapoor's reputation as a misdirected letter reveals details of his planned marriage), "Showman" rested in part on his willingness to repeatedly the distraught Ganga resolves to go to Calcutta. She intends push the envelope on how much of the female body govern­ to make no claim on Naren (who she thinks has spurned ment censors would permit filmmakers to "show" on screen: her), but only wants him to accept their son. from Nargis' wave-making bathing suit in Awara (1951), to Ganga's trials now take a more demeaning turn. Travel­ Dimple Kapadia's bikini in ing alone with her infant, the Bobby (1973), to Zeenat Aman's guileless girl (who knows blouseless mini-sari in Satyam only that Calcutta is the place Shivam Sundaram (1978). Man­ "where the Ganga ends") is dakini's bath in the waterfall, waylaid by a succession of witnessed by a dumbfounded exploiters: the madam of a Naren, is the equivalently cheap brothel in Rishikesh, scandalous scene here-her a lecherous brahman priest, gauzy sari rendered translu­ and finally a wily procurer for cent by the water to offer, in a high-class courtesan house effect, a full frontal display of in Banaras, who is drawn by the young actress' generous Mandakini's infamous waterfall bath in Ram Teri Ganga Maili. her beautiful voice. Though charms. The sight of such an some viewers might wince at apsara bathing in a waterfall is, naturally, an erotic invitation, the film's relentless depiction of the helpless vulnerability of and the film's hero is quick to respond. a young mother lacking the "protection" of a male escort, Pre-marital sex in Hindi cinema, at least until recently, the type of situations depicted, and the satire of exploitative generally adhered to two rules: (1) the encounter had to north Indian types is , alas, not altogether hyperbolic (espe­ be understood by the couple as a genuine and committed cially given that many prostitutes in Bombay and other cit­ "marriage," suggested by evocations of nuptial ritual (see, ies are in fact said to be waylaid girls from the Himalayas). e.g., the prototypical scene in Aradhana, 1969, in which Nor is Ganga entirely without agency: she fights back, re­ the heroine, wrapped in a red blanket, circles a blazing fire peatedly attempts escape, and hurls shaming sarcasm at her with the hero), and (2) even a single night's contact invari­ abusers and would-be corrupters. Throughout this numbing ably resulted in pregnancy that, moreover, produced a male "descent" of Ganga-personified, there are ironic allusions to offspring. In Ram Teri Ganga Maili, the pretext for Naren and the sacral status of the river for which she is named, that re­ Ganga's union is the supposed "mountain custom" of girls flect on the hypocrisy of formal religion (as when an elderly being allowed to choose their own spouses during an annual woman on a train refuses Ganga a sip of water for her infant, full-moon festival (represented by the song Sun Sahiba sun, in because it is precious Ganga-jal obtained on a pilgrimage). which Ganga dances and sings to Naren, "Listen, Beloved, I Though Ganga increasingly sees herself, and is seen by oth­ have chosen you; will you choose me?"), as well as the pres­ ers, as a "fallen" woman, the film is careful to maintain her sure exerted by another local suitor. After her dance, Ganga technical chastity, and the "Bai" or courtesan to whom she leads Naren to a ruined temple that has been adorned as a is eventually apprenticed gives a speech clarifying that her, nuptial chamber, while outside her stalwart brother Karan girls are trained only for "singing and dancing," and are not Singh (played by Hindi-speaking Indo-A merican actor Tom forced to "sell their bodies." Nevertheless, after a remarkable Alter in a rare non-Anglo role) fights off the jilted fiance and dance performance in a pavilion on the bank of the holy river his minions, ultimately sacrificing his life for his sister's hap­ that reprieves the title song, now in Ganga's plaintive voice, piness. she is indeed sold-to a powerful politician from Calcutta Alas, that happiness is not destined to last long. After a sin­ (Naren's father's crony), thus paving the way for the film's cli­ gle blissful night, Naren returns to Calcutta with his school max, in which Ganga is brought to perform at Naren's wed­ group, promising to come back soon to fetch Ganga. Instead, ding to Radha, the politician's daughter. Kapoor pulls out he finds the family mansion adorned for his ciwn . engage­ all the stops during this remarkable sequence, juxtaposing ment party, and when he tries to tell his grandmother that a double entendre-laden bhajan (Ek Radha, eh Meera, "There he is already married, she suffers a heart attack He attempts is Radha, here is Meera)" with a series of seemingly irresolv­ to escape to rejoin Ganga, but is apprehended in Rishikesh able dharma-dilemmas, escalating dramatic speeches, and and brought back to Calcutta a virtual prisoner, as plans for even a (somewhat) surprising ending. Though the sincere his marriage proceed. The mise-en-scene now alternates but ineffectual Naren finally finds a voice, it is the perfor­ between Naren's trials and the advancement of Ganga's mances of Saeed jaffrey as Kunj Bihari-an old debauchee pregnancy against the backdrop of changing seasons in the uncle who refuses to be a hypocrite-and of Mandakini as Ganga-an innocent who is nevertheless discerning and ca­ dispatched to the hills in 1997 to collect sunny news sto­ pable of the most disarming forthrightness-that dominate ries on the theme of "what fifty years of Independence have the film. When the two finally meet, Bihari (plotting a way done for you." Instead, he finds barbed wire, bombs, bit­ out of Ganga's plight and alluding to Sita's agni parihsha or terness, and secessionist ethnic rebels. His hyperactivity is "fire ordeal" in the Ramayana) delivers the memorable line, counterbalanced by Manisha Koirala's portrayal of Meghna "You have already been through a severe fire-test, daughter­ ("the cloudy one"), a brooding waif whom he encounters en­ in-law; it is now your Ram's turn to be tested!" route, and whose coldness conceals past traumas and deadly As an ideological statement, the film displays all the sta­ secrets. The hero sets out, with sheer exuberance and os- tus-quo-maintaining charac­ tentatious passion, to tame this teristics of Kapoor's work (and beautiful and elusive shrew-a indeed of much mainstream stock plotline in Bombay ro­ Hindi cinema): the ultimate mances, but in this case, the reduction of social conflict to results are unexpected and in­ family squabbles that can be creasingly ominous. resolved through "love" and It seems that Meghna is al­ "faith," and the combination ready married ... though not to of enlightened messages about another man, but to a cause that women's agency and honor the hero cannot fathom: her with the relentless display of The sundered ramily reunited in the penultimate scene or Ram Tcri people's bid for independence their bodies and the stereotyp- Ganga Maili. from the Indian state. After the ing of their social roles within an unquestioned patriarchal interval, the action shifts to New Delhi, where the infatuated matrix (Dissanayake and Sahai 1988). Yet like all of Kapoor's reporter, still pursuing his dream woman and half-heartedly best work (e.g., his 1950s masterpieces Awara and Shri wooing another (Preity Zinta) who has been proposed by his 420)-it also presents a visual and textual richness that can parents, stumbles onto a plot to assassinate the President of support variant readings, and the director's use of the Hi­ India during the annual Republic Day Parade on january malayan trope to at once evoke classical narrative, religious 26th, and soon runs afoul of both the plotters and the heavy­ and nationalist discourse, and even an environmental and handed intelligence team working frantically to stop them. political message is especially noteworthy. Mountain people The film's jarring and decidedly unhappy ending-in which figure in the film as innocent rustics who live close to, and Amar embraces Meghna, knowing that she has been dressed are nourished by, the literal wellsprings of Hindu tradition. as a human bomb, thus killing them both-disturbed many Their daughter Ganga descends to bless the urbanized plains Indian viewers, though this and other nonstandard features and in the process becomes "polluted" by them, though in have also won the film staunch fans. the end her inherent purity is affirmed. Male and female, Indeed, throughout Dil Se, Ratnam plays with conven­ culture and nature, city and mountainside come together in tions, setting up audience expectations and then repeatedly the film's final moments to forge a nuclear family that hints frustrating them. He skillfully uses the trope of the unremit­ (like the union of Shakuntala and Dushyanta) at the possibil­ tingly ardent though initially unrequited male lover-por­ ity of a new national era. trayed by Shahrukh Khan himself in several prior films (e.g., A far less optimistic prognosis emerges from Mani Rat­ Dill·vale Dullwniya lejayenge, 1995), and itself a reincarnation nam's 1998 Dil Se ("with [all my] heart"), a film that again of a narcissistic hero-type popularized by Raj and Shammi rehearses the trope of an urban boy falling in love with a Kapoor, among others-to create the expectation that the mountain girl, but this time in the service of a radically heroine's iciness will gradually melt (the usual outcome of unsettling narrative. Since becoming a crossover success in such pursuit); he further baits viewers with hints that this Hindi with Nayakan ("Boss," 1987, a dubbed version of his is occurring (as when Meghna briefly loosens up and even award-winning Tamil film starring Kamal Haasan) Tamil di­ jokes with Amar during a foot journey in Ladakh). But rector Ratnam has made a series of controversial mainstream "cloudy" Meghna is no demure mountain maid, playfully films that touch on potent contemporary issues: the bloody resisting the hero's wooing while actually desiring it. When Kashmir secession conflict (Raja, 1992) and the Bombay Hin­ she repeatedly tells Amar to leave her alone, she seems to du-Muslim riots of 1993 (Bombay, 1994). His fourth Hindi mean it (he of course ignores such protests), and when he film, Dil Se, is set against the background of insurgent and finally attempts to embrace and kiss her she displays a spasm counter-insurgent violence in the eastern Himalayan region, of violent and seemingly involuntary gagging. Her revulsion and the threat of national disintegration, especially following to physical contact with a man is ultimately explained in a the 1991 assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a horrific flashback, near the film's end, to a childhood scene female suicide-bomber. of her snow-covered village being attacked by Indian govern­ Shahrukh Khan plays a frenetic Delhi yuppie named Amar ment soldiers, who shoot most of the inhabitants, burn their (ironically meaning "immortal"), an All India Radio reporter homes, and rape Meghna's older sister and then the twelve- the subcontinent from the high-altitude deserts of Ladakh to the palm-fringed backwaters of Kerala to offer, in a jarring counterpoint to the screenplay, an idealized nahha-shihha ("head to toe") portrait of the undivided body of Bharat Mata (the. nation personified as mother goddess) that evokes the Indian national anthem's sweeping catalog of geographic and ethnic regions. But though the songs are inserted more-or­ less diegetically into the story (thus a song occurs atop a train moving through the mountains while Amar is traveling on one, and on the streets of a hill towri. while he is posted as a reporter there), they are jarringly discontinuous with its sto­ ryline and dialog, which makes their precise nature unclear. Uncoded as dream sequences or fantasies, they might be taken as the reveries of Amar, or of Meghna, or of neither: A scene from the song sequence "Salrangi Re" in Dil Se . perhaps they are simply glimpses of a parallel reality-such as that of some other, previous film-in which the loving union of these two protagonists is truly possible. In the most year old herself. Though rape is not an unusual occurrence striking such sequence, while Amar and Meghna journey on in post-l970s mainstream cinema, the child's-eye view of it foot across the Ladakhi plateau and he relentlessly tries to presented here, and its shocking perpetration by agents of break down her resistance, the song Satrangi Re ("seven col­ the state, robs it of any potential as titillating male-gaze spec­ ors" [of love]) presents the two as passionate lovers, literally tacle, even as it openly concedes the existence of government­ united by nets and draperies as well as by erotic choreogra­ sponsored terror. Far from being idyllic rustics, the survivors phy. All this unfolds in settings that, although they clearly of the mountain massacre become determined secessionists, signal the high Himalayas, lack the sylvan charm of more fighting back through terrorism to achieve their demand of standard love song picturizations. These are dusty, barren, their own homeland. Since the film's primary concern ap­ jagged mountain spaces that accord well with the pounding pears to be the troubled relationship between the central message of the lyrics, which offer no lilting romantic cliches government and the peripheral and ethnic-minority states, but rather a hard-edged portrait of obsessive and doomed it is often deliberately vague about its location-a fact that infatuation. angered some viewers in Assam (which is clearly referenced When l come near you and touch the Oare of heat of your in certain segments), who felt that their actual grievances body, my breath begins to burn .... were flattened and oversimplified by the filml In fact, the My life will be a frenzy, my death will be a frenzy. mise-en-scene shifts abruptly between the forested hillsides Now there is no other relief except this. of Assam and the high altitude deserts of Ladakh, in a move In this sequence, Ratnam stands the convention of the Hi­ that appears motivated both by a desire for spectacle and by malayan love song on its head, placing his (non-)lovers in a willingness to lump all mountain minorities together in an inhospitable but authentic mountain-scape that bespeaks juxtaposition to its hero, "All-India" Amar: an upper-middle­ extremes of light, darkness, heat, cold, and emotion. class Delhi boy who still believes, throughout most of the It ends, as mountain love songs smnetimes do, in a snow­ film, in the benevolence of the central government toward field on which the lovers embrace: but then it immediately lays its multi-ethnic citizens. Amar's bouncy but clueless and Amar, clad in a shroud-like dhoti, immobile across Meghna's self-centered character thus offers an ironic commentary on lap in an image that is at once a Pieta and a Liesbestod, and that the official state discourse of "national integration" which he prefigures the film's grim finale and the lyric (culminating a espouses. As Amar labors manfully to lure Meghna into a reprise of Satrangi Re) that will accompany it: lasting union based on (his) ideals, asking her to forget past injustices and (literal) violations; his implicit message-'just Let me sleep in the womb of death, love me and everything will be all right! "-appears increas­ Let me drown my body in your soul, 0 seven-colored one .... ingly hollow as we learn more about her life. His love is as selfish as it is passionate, and both blind to and seemingly Yet in this image of sex (and death) in the snow, the erotic uninterested in the reality of the girl's traumatic past. · trope of the Himalayas reappears alive and well, here in­ Dil Se is especially notable for its musical sequences, bril­ voked to great ironic effect by a gifted director presenting liantly scored by A. R. Rahman to haunting Urdu lyrics by a nonstandard cinematic message in the framework of a S. S. Gulzar. They combine folkish melodies and driving conventional six-song masala melodrama that combines ro­ rhythms with Indo-Persian glwzal imagery and hypnotic rap­ mance, humor, and suspenseful action-adventure. Ratnam's style declamation. Picturized through the stunning outdoor persistent use of dislocation in song sequences contributes cinematography of Santosh Sivan, the songs collectively span to the uneasy unfolding of his storyline, and appears deliber- ately intended to mirror not just the eventual fate of the film's of moumain landscape with lovers' union are also found in Ta mil protagonists, but the potential one of the nation that they poetry, though here the mountains are the lower, densely for es ted embody. The union of mountain goddess and plains prince, hills of the southeastern Ghats, and the predominant narrative apparently no longe r possible in the mundane world except trope is of the union of a lowland girl with a mountain warrior in the most hyperbolic fantasy, here results not in a harmoni­ (Ramanujan 1975:105-107). ous new national family, but in a horrific and suicidal act of 3. lam grateful to j oanne Kirkpatrick for this reference. dis-integration. 4. For other classical references to the Uttarakurus' dev iant dharmic code and to a northern "kingdom of women," see White REFERENCES 1991:121-23. Berreman, Gerald D. 1972. Hi11dus of the Himalayas. Berkeley 5. As a hippie mecca, Kathmandu acquired special notoriety dur­ and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ing this period, and for a variety of reasons. Im agined (not entirely Dimmitt, Cornelia, and J. A. B. van Buitenen (editors and wrongly) as the epicenter of the young tourists' orgiastic behavior, nanslators), 1978. Classical Hindu Mythology. Philadelphia: it attracted the longing gaze of (espec ially) Indian men, titillated Temple University Press. by the prospect of scantily clad, drug-crazed blonde nymphets giving themselves freely to a range of casual comers-on. Indeed, Dissanayake, Wimal and Malti Sahai. 1988. Raj Kapoor's Films: the fantasy that even the locals who live beyond the Himalayas Harmony of Discourses. New Delhi: Vikas. have looser morals and less inhibitions, and that their womenfolk Lutgendorf, Philip. 2000. "City, Forest, and Cosmos: Ecological exercise fre er agency in their choice of partners-a standard that Perspectives from the Sanskrit Epics," in Christopher Key invites both opprobrium and envy from those who see themselves Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker (eds.), Hi11duism a11d Ecology, as more constrained by strict dharma- has long led to a certain 269-289. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. exoticization of the Nepali Other-a kind of homegrown Indian Ramanujan, A. K. (translator). 1975 (1967). The I11terior orientalism, fo cused on a mountain Hindu kingdom where (it is Landscape. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. said) even brahmans eat meat, drink alcohol, and have a proclivity for tantric rituals. Moreover, during the latter days of Congress Raj , Sax, William. 2002. Dancing th e Self Oxford and New York: when India's imports were still severely restricted by protec tion­ Oxford University Press. ist trade barriers and the middle classes were enjoined to prac­ Thomas, Rosie. 1989. "Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologization tice Gandhian austerity, this fantasy was augmemed by the fa ct of Mother India," Quarterly Review of Fi/111 a11d Video 11:3, 11-30. of Nepal's freer economy, which made Kathmandu an alluring van Buitenen,J. A. B. (trans.). 1973. The Mahablwrata, Volume l. bazaar of foreign consumer goods, especially East Asian electron­ Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ics and watches (considered to be far superior to the equivalent Indian products), clothing, and liquor. The imagined lifestyles of ---· (trans.) 1975. The Mahabharata, Volume 2. Chicago: the transnational rich, carried out poolside and in the discotheque University of Chicago Press. of Kathmandu's five -star Soaltee Oberoi Hotel, added another layer White, David Gordon. 1991. Myths of the Dog-Mw1. Chicago: to the Anand film's complex fantasy of a trans-Himalayan re alm of University of Chicago Press. forbidden pleasures-so near, and yet so far beyond the mea ns of ____1996. Til e Alchemical Body. Chicago: University of the average Indian. Chicago Press. 6. ln a remarkable reflexive moment about an hour into the film , after Manav and Manasi have revealed their mutual love and in­ ENDNOTES dulged in (at the least) some heavy petting, Manav remarks to her l. I am grateful to Mark Liechty for inviting me to participate that, although he must now return to Bombay with his family, his in the panel "Representations of the Himalaya," at the 33rd An­ love will not be like "those typical Hindi film s in which a boy from nual Conference on South Asia (University of Wisconsin, Madison; the city fall s in love with a Pahari girl. .. .and then leaves her and October, 2004) for which the original version of this essay was never comes back." This is, of course, precisely what will proceed written. The revision of the paper has benefited from the comments to occur in this neo-Shakuntala tale. of my colleague Priya Kumar. 7. l am grateful to Assamese scholar Amit Baishya for this per­ 2. I should immediately add that the notion of the Himalaya s spective on the film , which drew strong protest in Assam and was as an extra-social erotic space, though very common in Hindi cin­ form ally banned (like other Hindi films) in adjoining Nagaland and ema, certainly does not exhaust the moods and meanings.that the Manipur. It should also be noted that Amar's repeated verbal ref­ mountains may be used to convey. Two other recurring (if less per­ erences to Meghna's ethnic "difference" (he call s her "fl at-nosed ") vasive) themes are of the Himalaya as a pl ace of pilgrimage (evok­ alludes both to common stereotypes of Himalayan populations and ing the ra sa or aesthetic mood of bhakti or devotion; e.g., in films to actress Koirala's Nepalese background. ·such as Amarnath, 1978), and as a site of war (evoking patriotism and vim ra sa or the heroic mood, as in severai recent films concern­ ing Indo-Pakistani border conflict; e.g., L.O.C. Kargil,_200 3, and Lahshya , 2004). Further, it is worth noting that ancient associations C 11FFOIW OwtN